This didn’t hold back XDA Forum Member pcelli from getting the Galaxy Gear to work on the Nexus 5 however, and he shared the method on the XDA forums for other owners of non-Samsung devices to try out. The process is quite simple, though it may take some time. It essentially involves installing the gearmanagerstub.apk, extracting the various APKfiles from gear manager 1.6 111801.apk, and manually installing them one-by-one onto your device.

Gathering from the community response, it seems like devices running AOSP-derived Android 4.4.2 ROMs are having some luck with the process, such as the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z1. An issue that’s appearing to be consistent among all these devices is the failure to run ‘Weather’ and ‘S Voice,’ and this may be because both features are TouchWiz based.

It should be kept in mind that this loophole is not guaranteed to run on your device, and there’s the possibility that a future Galaxy Gear update will patch this up, so it may not be a wise idea to rush out and buy one simply because of this loophole. But if you happen to have a Galaxy Gear and a non-compatible device on your table, or if you’re interested in the details, check out the original thread.

HTC 10 (Unlocked)

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge (Verizon) [SM-G935V]

Nexus 5 (Unlocked)

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